November is normally a very busy month for myself as many of my friends have birthdays spread throughout the month often leading me to be involved in various parties events and general mayhem. This year in particular with myself struggling with sciatica and other health issues and the various other commitments of my friends have led us to abandon large activities so instead we put aside some days for some monster gaming sessions.

Collecting together on a Sunday just after lunch at the house of our host and Dungeon Master told us that he had managed to get a number of dungeon tile sets and a number of pre-made dungeons so we were going to do some 4 Edition Dungeon Runs and see how far we could get before we ended for the day or party wiped.

We decided to avoid wasting half the day creating a character we would use pre-generated characters, unfortunately due to our DM providing 30 to choose from it still took us 30 minutes of debating of what to pick.
Most of the characters came from the handy Pre-Generated Character Library of Dungeon Master's.com (Thanks guys) with myself selecting Belgos | Drow Ranger (Hunter) backed up by a Psion, a Sorcerer and a Warlord then an hour later after our first two encounters by two more players who chose Alvenor the Human Paladin and Jarren the Human Wizard (Evocation Mage).

Thankfully with the Pre-Generated Characters coming with clear move description we got into the play quick smashing our way clumsy through the first few encounters. Now there is something about my gaming group I have come to recognise while we work together well and respect one another's ideas and strengths we do not in fact have very good teamwork synergy on the board. This was very obvious in 4th Edition which now I've played it felt very much like a pen and paper MMO, however once we stopped treating it like a Pathfinder game and started using MMO tactics we started making progress.

Twelve hours, a mountain of dead kobold and a slain white dragon with an arrow lodged in its behind later I can honestly say I enjoyed 4th Edition even though I must admit I've often frowned upon it.
However the fact I had to treat it like a game of HeroQuest rather than a roleplay game kind of puts it in perspective, and I admit the group as a whole started getting rather bored with the mechanics due to the limited movepool and cool downs.    

Coming straight from Pathfinder and Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 I found the rule books to both be well labelled and clear in some sections but completely bare in others, in particular the levelling was rather confusing at first with it been so different from the standard Dungeons and Dragons layout and one moment of the day stands out to me was the lack of any random magic loot table. Combined with the minimal magic item examples made the rewards rather disappointing as initially our DM wished to avoid giving out custom loot for balance reasons.

All and all a fun distraction but there is no way we could really go through a long term campaign with the system due to it repetitiveness and feeling of lack of freedom.


The other game that caught our eye over the week has been The Resistance 2nd Edition.
This novel little game was a real mind screw and as a devious spy I got to wreak havoc on my friends discovering that I am rather the decent manipulator.
Resistance is a rather simple game and a version of it that can be played with playing cards is actually on wikipedia. In the game you are all members of a resistance cell that is attempting to topple a corrupt organisation or government however depending on the size of your cell (the number of players) there is a number of spies within your cell. The resistance win by succeeding in three mission while the spies win by causing three missions to fail, if this has peaked your interest below is a video of Wil Wheaton's Tabletop showing a play through.